Books Burn Badly

Books Burn Badly, published in Spain in 2006, is his first
full-length novel and, as if to make up for lost time, it’s a
doorstop. It’s also a glittering edifice of tableaux and fragments;
flashbacks, premonitions and non-sequiturs; short stories and tall
tales, mostly set between 1936 and the late 1960s. The book’s core
scene is the one that gives it its title. It is 19 August 1936, and
Falangist officials, helped by locals with an eye on the future, are
staging a bonfire at the docks in A Coruña. The fire is fed with
volumes and pamphlets from workers’ associations, radical bookshops
and rationalist schools, and with books from the vast library of
Santiago Casares Quiroga, the Galician-born last Republican prime
minister, who resigned a month before Franco declared war; he had
opposed, Allende-like, the distribution of arms to the people. Calling
out the titles in lewd or gloating fashion, young soldiers supervised
by Ricardo Samos, an ambitious local lawyer, cast books into the
flames as if in preparation for Spain’s shutters being closed. ‘Does
God Exist? Aurora Library. No more questions, Aurora, darling! Victor
Hugo, Les Misérables. Hell’s not miserable. Madame Bovary. One
less ovary!’ The books resist being consumed, releasing a viscous,
sickening smoke. They are like creatures – ‘he saw it suddenly fan out
its fresh pollack’s red gills’; ‘a cluster of birds reduced to ashen
silhouettes and glowing yellow or orange beaks’ – but the prevailing
metaphor is of human flesh. Polka, the anarchist grave-digger who is
forced to bury what is left of the books, recalls ‘the folds and tips
of toasted skin, the nervous resistance of gut-string, the bony
splinters of shrivelled paper. The books’ remains.’